The Twelve Days of Dash & Lily (Dash & Lily #2)

by Rachel Cohn

It’s always the ones who believe who are hurt the most when things go wrong.

Sweagatory—sweaty purgatory.

I could feel the organic inklings of excitement as I remembered one of the poems Mom used to read to us at this time of year, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The holiest of all holidays are those Kept by ourselves in silence and apart; The secret anniversaries of the heart, When the full river of feeling overflows;— The happy days unclouded to their close; The sudden joys that out of darkness start As flames from ashes; swift desires that dart Like swallows singing down each wind that blows! White as the gleam of a receding sail, White as a cloud that floats and fades in air, White as the whitest lily on a stream, These tender memories are;—a fairy tale Of some enchanted land we know not where, But lovely as a landscape in a dream.

I know in my heart that I can live without him and I know in my heart that I don’t want to—that’s a good place to start, right?”

Are you going to be someone who takes charge of her feelings and her actions, even if the outcome might hurt, or someone who lets herself be unhappy simply because she won’t ask for what she wants?”

“People who want things to be perfect are always impossible to please. But that doesn’t mean we should stop trying. Even if their expectations aren’t correct, their instincts are. You won’t get everything right, Dash. Even Lily knows that. The trying is what matters.” “It’s the thought that counts, then.” “Ah, but have you ever tried counting thoughts? They are extraordinarily hard to wrangle.”

What an idiot Santa is for flying around alone. Because who would want to travel the world without another person’s heartbeat beside him?

I think that reality has the distinct potential to completely suck, and the way to get around that is to step out of reality from time to time and find something a little more enjoyable with someone you completely, unadulteratedly enjoy.

“Escape, sure. But it wasn’t so much about getting away, as going to. You can go anywhere in a book. Books are adventure. Knowledge. Possibility. Magic.”

The minute she left the apartment, I missed having her there. But as with all loves, I supposed, the consolation was in the fact that she’d be back.

But the older you get, the more you realize that, yes, there are all these things that link you to the past, and you’re using the same words and singing the same songs that have always been there for you, but each time, things have shifted, and you have to deal with that shift.

First, I gave Boris a chew toy that he massacred within a minute of receiving. One moment it was a perfectly good Donald Trump doll. The next it was a flying toupee and dismembered body parts.